Inside the Mind of BTK

Q
2
The sun had yet to appear in the sky when I awoke the
next morning, a few hours after finally drifting back to sleep. Out of
habit, I quickly rolled over to check the legal pad sitting on my bedside
table. Years before, I’d trained myself to dream about whatever
case I was working on. More often than not, in the middle of the
night, still half asleep, I’d open my eyes, fumble for a pen, and scribble
cryptic notes on the pad, clues culled from the depths of my subconscious.
My wife, Pam, hated this habit of mine because it always
woke her up.
But on this chilly fall morning, the top page appeared blank. I
switched on a lamp, just to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks
on me. Pam moaned. I turned off the light, got dressed in the darkness,
and drove the winding twenty-one miles to my office at Quantico,
located on the main floor of the agency’s forensic science
building. The location was a definite upgrade from the previous home
of the Behavioral Science Unit—in the basement beneath the FBI
Academy’s library. But the downside was that my office was constantly
awash with nauseous, chemical fumes from the various laboratories
in the building. On any given day, researchers attempting to develop
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